Luster: A Novel

by Raven Leilani

  “Eric,” I say, embarrassed by the apparent relief in my voice.

  “She lives,” he says, and I sense his irritation. It should make me happy, but his anger is different when it is not theoretical, and I panic.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “You did?”

  “Of course not. But I worried. I worry about you in that neighborhood.”

  “You worry about me?” I say, because I like the idea of someone out there wondering if I’ve died, though in the moment his whiteness is unbearable. Also I know he is just trying to make me feel bad about not responding, but even this performative concern feels good. “It’s just Bushwick.”

  “Have you looked at the crime map? They update it regularly. A good amount of forced sodomy in your area. Rebecca got mugged coming out of the supermarket eight years ago. Two miles away from our house. Guy took her ring and I had to get her a new one.”

  “How’s the conference going?”

  “It’s good. All these NARA nerds. I feel at home. But I miss you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I say, putting him on speakerphone so I can hold the gun.

  “No, I do. I mean that. I’ve had a lot of time to think up here. You know when you go to a hotel and get one of those rough towels, and the toilet is sealed and certified with a sticker? That’s Toronto. Clean. Everyone has great skin.”

  “What have you been thinking about?” I ask, because I’ve never been to a hotel.

  “A lot of things. I was working with some glass plate negatives. T. E. Lawrence. The negatives were so degraded I went back to the hotel and found flakes of the film inside my glove. I put them under a light and mostly it was a wash, but in one or two I could still see the desert, the color-reversed sand. And I just felt like, fuck, this exact thing is happening to me, you know, cellularly.” He laughs, and I can tell he is embarrassed. For a moment, I think I love him. I hold the gun with two hands.

  “I totally get that.”

  “I could leave my wife,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I could leave her. Easily.”

  “Okay.”

  “Listen, I have to go now but I’ll be home in three days. Let’s talk about it then?” He hangs up, and for a while I just sit there with the gun in my lap. I open my photo gallery and look at the picture of Rebecca and Akila in the garden. I put the gun back in the box, push it back under the bed, and wander around the house. I imagine all of it is mine. But even when I make myself comfortable, when I find an orange and eat it over the sink, I have the sensation of stepping into someone else’s shoes. I know that if Eric leaves his wife, we’ll have to move to another town. A suburb with rival high schools. A small apartment stocked with wax paper and bananas. A lightly used American car that we share. A place where our shoes appear side by side. A cabinet full of plastic Price Chopper bags and a nervous old dog that loves him more than it loves me. I could do it, though as I press the rind into the trash and see all the proof of life, the soggy cornflakes and chicken fat, I know that his declaration, the dangling carrot for which mistresses everywhere open their stupid mouths, is complete bullshit. Believing he will leave Rebecca is one of the few personal failures I can absolutely avoid, but then I see that picture of him in Greece again, his pit stains and passport necklace and vacation stubble, and I just eat it up. Because I have not been laid in a month, and everything looks good. Men in magazines who wear chambray and pretend to water plants. That self-portrait of Rembrandt where his collar is turned up. The Allstate insurance man and Stringer Bell. Thirty days have passed since Eric and I last fucked, and it is agony. I take the picture off the fridge and head to my room, but on the way I notice the door to Akila’s room is open.

  * * *

  Inside it smells like body butter and Hot Pockets, like a rank, pubescent Yankee Candle, but otherwise, this is the most fantastic room in the house. The cutesy stay out sign on the door now seems out of step if not ironic, the room less the product of petulant stoicism and more a tribute to earnest fandom, the walls papered in dragons, wiccan infographics, and lithe Korean boys, quartz and drusy stones and dirty zirconia hanging from strategically placed tacks, Gothic illustrations of woodland faeries on linen, steampunk goggles strapped to a wig stand where seven wigs are stacked in accordance with ROYGBIV. On the TV there are several figurines, though the only ones I recognize are Robin and the Takashi Murakami miniature of a girl spraying milk from her tits. Because of my sexless career as a high school studio art kid, I was frequently adjacent to the prototypes for girls like this, girls who were horse-girls except with cats, girls with patches and pins who uploaded their Suicide Girl auditions with the translucent computer lab Macs, girls who were Goth-lite, in and out of Hot Topic and Torrid with their weepy, sallow boys, shy dabblers in anime and D&D, though in the years I have been away I see it has gotten sexier and more bleak, the interludes between Akila’s shrines to Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton dripping in intermediate sorcery and sex, bloody grindhouse stills framed next to fishnets and a wilted go-go boot, all the hairless CGI men with their hips canted, corollaries of the comic stacks and spell scrolls and everything else exalting the perfect and unreal.

  Weirdly, the frankness of this intensity is hard on my conscience. I look through her closet and feel terrible about it. I find a cache of notebooks and scan through them, and all of it is raw—cruel, longing portraits of her classmates, careful records of calorie allotments, and in one totally nondescript composition notebook, pages upon pages of Batman fan fiction. I read it for a while because it is pretty good. The characters are believably drawn, Bruce Wayne out and about in Gotham in his playboy iteration, attending an auction for the last model of the gun that killed his parents, losing the auction to a black, omniscient sprite that is clearly Akila’s surrogate, though Clark Kent becomes more prominent as the story goes on, lounging around the Batcave post breakup with Lois Lane, who doesn’t take him seriously as a journalist or a man. I do not expect this fan fiction to become about how he reclaims his manhood, and I do not expect the lengthy description of the soaps in Bruce’s bat-shaped bath. Here, there are some character problems, the exclamation points in Batman’s dialogue ultimately less believable than his sexual awe and jealousy, as he is a human man with a complicated belt and Clark is an intergalactic softboi with infinite strength. It’s so dirty and engrossing that I don’t notice Akila until she is ripping the notebook out of my hands. She clutches it against her chest and looks at the floor. To see her there, the embarrassment open on her small face, feels like seeing an Olive Garden commercial after having already plowed through two bowls of fettuccini. The stark photorealism always beyond a terrible indulgence, in this case the invasion of her privacy, which I had shrugged off as an extension of Rebecca’s, though of course that was incorrect. Once Akila herself is grounded in the context of her room, her vulnerability, her personhood, is concrete. She doesn’t speak and puts the notebooks exactly where they were. It is strange to see that even these secret things have a fixed place. If I destroyed this marriage, I would be destroying this, too.

  “Can you please leave?” she says in a high voice, her back still turned. I leave and go outside and have a cigarette. I am a creep. My bowels don’t work and maybe there are other things inside me that are dead, but there is so much life around me, tomatoes that beat the bugs and rot, waiting to be held by a hand. I watch the sunset. I’m not sure what day it is. Technically early September is not fall, but so many of the trees are already bald. Across the way that same white lady is watching me through her blinds. I salute her and she recedes. Rebecca comes out and glances at me, fishing her keys from her purse.

  “A body came in. I have to work,” she says, and though she is speaking to me, I feel our last conversation still in the air. Her eyes linger on my cigarette and I think she’s going to ask me to put it out, but instead she asks for one. I light her up. “Akila has tae kwon do in an hour,” she says, turning t
o unlock her car. “You can take the Volvo. The studio is a mile down the road, in the shopping center.” She gets into her Lincoln Navigator and tears out of the driveway, and inside Akila is already dressed in her gi.

  * * *

  Later, we proceed to the car. She puts her gear in the back and we slide silently into our seats. It is only once I’m behind the wheel that I realize this is Eric’s car. I start the engine and try not to think about the last time I was in this spot, in his lap, the memory of his fist a heat behind my eyes. I open the glove compartment, and there are a handful of watermelon Jolly Ranchers. There is also a flask, and I close it quickly, glance at Akila to see if she saw. But she is looking out of the window, already engaged in the merciful act of pretending I’m not here. I haven’t driven in three years. I pull out onto the road and stop short at a red light. I turn and look at Akila, and beyond her there is an actual deer. I roll down the window and yell at it because I’m already dealing with too many moving parts. Akila turns and glares at me, and then her face softens and grows nervous. I know it’s because she can tell I’m nervous, and that makes it worse.

  “Do you know how to drive?”

  “Yes,” I say, though when it starts to rain I scramble to find the switch for the wipers. She reaches over calmly and switches them on. I hunch over the wheel and continue on. After a harrowing seven minutes, we arrive at the shopping center. The dojang is sitting between a dimly lit Morton Williams and a nail parlor that has begun to scroll down its metal door. She takes her bag and goes inside. I park the car and for a while I go back and forth on whether it would be weirder to stay in the car or go in. Eventually I go inside because I need to use the bathroom. After, I take a seat behind a group of ornery parents who occasionally look up from their phones to clap. The practice is so structured, it is almost nonviolent, the master a stocky, terrifying man who circles the mat as they run through leg extensions and isolated abdominal work, endurance drills that they count off in Korean in increments of ten, a few adults in the mix who are being very dramatic during the stretching portion, everyone doing assisted butterflies and half splits and almost certainly farting up a storm. The dojang smells like it was scooped out of someone’s belly button, but after fifteen minutes I don’t smell anything but Lysol and the seasoned plastic of used sparring gear. There are co-instructors wandering around, and for the most part they are cheerful and nondescript, but one of them is black and when I catch his eye, he pauses in the middle of his form and smiles. Like most hyper-symmetrical black men, his smile is a disarming show of contrasts and, in this case, anchored by an obscene pair of dimples. I smile back at him and think bitterly about my abstinence. His eyes are bright and kind, and so of course I picture our children, our rent, and our amicable divorce in the time it takes him to move along as the students run around the mat in bare feet, count through axe and crescent kicks and land light blows on each other as the master grunts his approval of the more crisp performers and attends to the stereo, which, underneath the agony of the class, is playing the soundtrack from The Matrix Reloaded.

  * * *

  Akila is in the middle of it, hitting her marks with confidence and even a little style, her place in the hierarchy clear even without the signifier of her belt, a dark purple that I see on only one other student. Her focus is so intense it is almost embarrassing to watch, though when they bring out a stack of small pine boards for breaking drills and I see her go through three at once my breath catches in my throat. Then the master takes the other purple belt, a small white girl with dark, sunken eyes, and the class settles down onto their knees as she and Akila spar. It is over quickly. Aside from a brief fall onto her back, Akila is reserved, less interested in force and more invested in precision, her contact so light and matter-of-fact you can feel her keeping careful score, an infuriating thing for her partner, who is good, but too upset by Akila’s composure to compete.

  “That pairing seems a little unfair. Look at her,” a parent says. Of course, it is not unfair. They are of the same belt and roughly the same age. Akila extends her hand, and the girl turns her back. In the car, Akila guzzles a bottle of water and takes out her phone to record the calories burned.

  “You were amazing,” I say, but Akila just turns the radio up. I’m excited to hear that it is Sister Sledge.

  “I hate this,” she says, connecting her phone to the aux cord, putting on what sounds like Japanese ska. We travel in silence. I glance at her and again she is turned to the window. She seems smaller now, more the girl who held the notebook to her chest. The song turns out to be over six minutes long and relentlessly manic, the trumpet and gurgling bass alternating over rapid-fire Japanese.

  “I thought it was good,” I say as we pull into the driveway.

  “What?” she says, already halfway out of the car.

  “Your story,” I say, and she stops and looks back at me, her eyes soft. Then she turns, shoulders her gear, and marches into the house without another word. Rebecca is still not home, and so when I look through the pantry, I take my time. I find a box of powdered milk and take it to my room. I mix it with some water in my Captain Planet mug and then I add a little of the cyan. I find my palette and mix a few more shades of blue. I open my photo gallery and find the picture of Akila and Rebecca. I take a book from the living room and tear out the copyright page. I work until 3 a.m., until the two of them are down on the torn, yellowed paper, craned over a single tomato. In my sleep, Clark Kent arrives on the planet alone and falls into endless wealth, and across the country, a young Bruce Wayne is adopted by sweet, midwestern parents. There is no Batman, but there is still a Superman, a deadened Übermensch who imposes his idea of purity onto the earth.

  * * *

  In the morning, I wake up in a panic. It is not just that Eric will be home in a day and I still haven’t found a way to leave or tell him I was here. It’s that I’ve forgotten something. I wash up in the sink and throw on some clothes. Downstairs Rebecca is asleep on the couch in her jacket, and for a moment I pause and take her in, her open mouth and soft, nasal snore. On the train into the city I consider other men. All of them are asleep and exotic in their inertia, so still and distant that I’m free to notice their throats and fingernails. The train car is silent and filled with innocuous trash, a newspaper open to a group of charter school kids lobbing softballs in Ditmas Park, an umbrella stripped and inverted like an aluminum flower. The doors jam at every platform, but no one is coming in. During a long transfer, two Swedes roll by with teal suitcases, and a tired violinist leans away from the wall, props his violin under his chin, and then reconsiders.

  * * *

  I arrive at my old apartment and feel no tenderness toward it. The stairwell is still rotting and the roaches are still capable of flight. My landlord is there in what was presented in the apartment listing as a laundry room, but which is in actuality a room where 4C deals coke and where the walls are brimming with hardy city bees. I can hear the bees in the walls when I speak to her. I tell her that I left something behind of great sentimental value, and as I was not the best tenant, I am prepared to give her a light bribe, two five-dollar bills, but she pauses in the middle of whisking her matcha and says to go ahead. She says, We should’ve partied more, and smiles, revealing to me some new information, which is that I was at some point prominent enough in her world to party with, and that she is missing a tooth. I try to think of something to say as she sifts through a drawer of keys. I feel bad for how I avoided her every time rent was coming due, and I think about the hypothetical drugs we could’ve done together, what it would’ve been like to hold back her hair. She says, It was a bummer to evict you, and then I go upstairs and the place is freshly painted and spackled, the wet ecru making it feel for a moment like beyond the barred windows and brick there might be a sun. I close my eyes and enjoy the smell of the wet paint, the synthetic resin exact in where it shreds the sinuses. There is no sign I was ever here and that is kind of a relief. I reach into the back of my closet. If I’m
honest, a part of me hopes the painting won’t be there. But it is still there, and when I give the keys back to my landlord, I make sure the canvas is turned away. On the train, that isn’t so easy. A few commuters look up from their phones and stare, and there is a man in a corner seat who keeps looking at my painting like he has never seen a dead woman before.

  * * *

  By the time I get back to the house, the afternoon is gone. Akila is shut up in her room with a K-drama and Rebecca is up and about, a moist yoga mat unfurled on the floor. She emerges from the bathroom with a roll of tinfoil, looks at my painting, and doesn’t comment on it. She asks if I can help her dye her hair. As I begin to apply the dye, she adjusts the towel around her neck and glares at herself in the mirror with such a private disdain that I feel I shouldn’t be in the room. Our eyes meet in the mirror and I hold her gaze, though sustained eye contact has a way of quickly becoming unfriendly, the ratty terry cloth cape and tinfoil mohawk a sympathetic combination on any other woman, but sort of scary on her. I tell her to get on her knees. I bend her over the tub and secure her by the neck. She presses her face into the towel and I rinse the dye out, and it is only then that I think about the color, the blond now black, making her look paler, a little dissonant, like an adult actress assuming the role of Snow White. She looks at herself in the mirror and smiles, disappears into her room and comes out in all black. She asks me if I have any plans, though of course it is not really a question, and she ushers me outside, where there is an angry, orange dusk.